The Confidence Game

It's redundant, yes. It has been played, yes. Why not take a stroll down memory lane to remind us all one more time that there are million$ being
played. Every day. I admit it has crossed my mind to start a church or become a preacher. It is the oldest con game going. What an easy way to make
money$$$. How many people claimed these people spoke the word of God and how many now wonder if it is all just a sham?

As television's drawing power grew apparent, a crowd of celebrity preachers took to the air, competing for listener-donors. Today more than 1,000
different gospel shows are bounced off the satellites or distributed by radio tape and videotape to stations and cables. It's a bonanza for the
broadcast industry. A typical clear-channel radio station, WWVA of Wheeling, sells $1 million worth of evening half-hours to revivalists annually.
Billy Graham pays up to $25,000 per television station per hour for his prime-time crusades.

Denver Post - "The Rev.Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an
oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser." (The gay hooker he'd been bangin' and methin' around with the last three
years.) "According to disgraced pastor's overseers revealing details about Haggard"

America's all-time champion evangelist was Garner Ted Armstrong, whose national broadcasts drew $75 million a year to the Worldwide Church of God
run by Garner and his father, Herbert W. Armstrong. (That's double the amount collected by Billy Graham.) Money poured in from followers, many of whom
met in secret groups and donated 30 percent of their incomes. Garner lived like a maharaja in a California mansion with his own private jet, elegant
sports cars -- and, allegedly, female believers in bed. Trouble hit in 1976 when some members published a protest. They accused Garner of sex and
Herbert of self-enrichment. Chess champion Bobby Fischer said the elder Armstrong had used "mind control" to take nearly $100,000 from him. In 1978
the father fired the son, who started a new television religion

The Rev. Robert Carr of Durham, N.C., was sentenced to 10 years in prison in April for taking paychecks, food stamps, and welfare checks from
members of his Church of God and True Holiness. He and other church leaders kept believers like slaves in a dormitory, forced them to work in a
poultry plant, and pocketed their earnings. Carr's daughter and son-in-law also got prison terms, and a fourth church official is a fugitive. U.S.
attorney H.M. Michaux Jr., told me that Carr was arrested by state police, but the case was turned over to him for prosecution under a federal slavery
law.

You may recall Rev. Lonnie W. Latham, the Oklahoma Baptist minister who loudly advocated against and constantly condemmed gay marriage. He claimed
that that God instructed him to reach out to the gay community and help them to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle".
That is, right up until his arrest last year for for offering an undercover cop a blowjob. OOPs!

Dapper Oklahoma evangelist James Roy Whitby was known in the gospel world for saving Anita Bryant when she was a Tulsa schoolgirl. In 1978 he was
convicted of swindling an 83-year-old religious widow out of $25,000. In 1979 he was charged with selling $4 million in worthless Gospel Outreach
bonds. Accused with him the second time were three convicted swindlers, including the Rev. Tillman Sherron Jackson of Los Angeles, who had previously
bilked the born-again in the Baptist Foundation of America -- a $26 million fraud that caused a congressional probe in 1973. In the widow case,
Whitby's appeals ran out in 1980, and he's in prison. The Gospel Outreach case ended in acquittals, but U.S. attorney John Osgood took it
philosophically. "Their kind usually show up again," he told me

-- Bishop Lucius Cartwright and Pastor Albert Hamrick of St. Phillip's Pentecostal Church in Washington, D.C., were sent to jail in 1976 for
embezzling $250,000 while administering food stamp distribution. They used the money to buy a car, an ice cream parlor, and a bank building

He was convinced by leaders of "The Way" Bible society, a talking-in-tongues outfit, that his paralysis would be cured in a year if he moved to
the sect's headquarters in Ohio and donated large sums from his accident settlement. He gave $210,000 -- and later paid $10,000 more for a Cadillac
for a Way leader, and $11,000 for a BMW auto for another Way chief, and $13,000 for extraneous gifts requested by Way officials. The healing didn't
work, and Goodwin felt "took."

Just thought I'd point out some obvious absurdities for the crowd. Preaching is a game.

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